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Ye must all be alike

Catherine Gallagher, 27 January 1994

Writing Women in Jacobean England 
by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski.
Harvard, 431 pp., £35.95, February 1993, 0 674 96242 7
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... important courtiers and patrons of the period, using her paternal family connections to promote John Donne, among others, and participating in literary exchanges with her clients. The cultural prestige of these ladies in turn inspired Aemelia Lanyer, a commoner, to seek their patronage for her own poetry, which celebrated women’s virtues. Another ...

Hew their bones in sunder

Eamon Duffy: Lancelot Andrewes, 3 August 2006

Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures 
edited by Peter McCullough.
Oxford, 491 pp., £90, November 2005, 0 19 818774 2
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... was more to all this than shared churchmanship. In a celebrated comparison between Andrewes and John Donne, Eliot maintained that Andrewes was a ‘medieval’ rather than a ‘modern’ writer. He valued Andrewes because his magnificently dense prose subordinated personality to the demands of text, community and tradition. Andrewes bypassed subjective ...

Lord Have Mercy

James Shapiro: Plague Writing, 31 March 2011

Plague Writing in Early Modern England 
by Ernest Gilman.
Chicago, 295 pp., £24, June 2009, 978 0 226 29409 4
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... sickness [is] hot’ in London, we never see any evidence of plague or its victims. Shortly after, John Fletcher wrote The Tamer Tamed, in which a wife plays a trick on her domineering husband, having him quarantined after claiming to see the marks of plague on him: ‘The sickness … is i’ th’ house, sir,/My husband has it now, and raves ...

Banality and Anxiety

Michael Mason, 19 March 1981

Thirty Seconds 
by Michael Arlen.
Farrar, Straus/Faber, 211 pp., £5.50, February 1981, 0 374 27576 9
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The Crystal Bucket 
by Clive James.
Cape, 238 pp., £6.95, February 1981, 0 224 01890 6
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The Message of Television 
by Roger Silverstone.
Heinemann, 248 pp., £14.50, March 1981, 0 435 82825 8
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... in this new selection of his television criticism to Walter Pater, Keats, Saul Bellow and John Donne – consorting with boisterous jokes about the crushed budgerigars composing J.R.’s hatband. James goes as far as it is possible to go towards miscegenating Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and The John Curry ...

Heat in a Mild Climate

James Wood: Baron Britain of Aldeburgh, 19 December 2013

Benjamin Britten: A Life in the 20th Century 
by Paul Kildea.
Allen Lane, 635 pp., £30, January 2013, 978 1 84614 232 1
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Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music 
by Neil Powell.
Hutchinson, 512 pp., £25, January 2013, 978 0 09 193123 0
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... of war in different ways during the 1940s (the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne),♪ while Walton churned out music for coercive films like Henry V and The First of the Few. In his Violin Concerto, Britten inaugurated an always changing, unpredictable, lifelong obsession with the form known as the passacaglia, in which ...

In Myrtle Bowers

Blair Worden: Cavaliers, 30 June 2011

Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War 
by John Stubbs.
Viking, 549 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 0 670 91753 2
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... title is presumably a market pitch. The subtitle, perhaps another pitch, lays bare a problem which John Stubbs never grips. We are two-thirds of the way through before we reach ‘the English civil war’ of the 1640s. The bulk of the book is set in the generation before it, from the years around the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of fighting in ...

Angels and Dirt

Robert Dingley, 20 November 1980

Stanley Spencer RA 
by Richard Carline, Andrew Causey and Keith Bell.
Royal Academy/Weidenfeld, 239 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 297 77831 5
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... of discrimination and exclusion was alien to his sensibility, and he continually chafed at it. ‘John Donne Arriving in Heaven’ (1911) sees four people ‘praying in different directions’. When Heaven is all around, there is no single direction in which to turn, no focal point on which to concentrate. If a world resides in one grain of sand it must ...

Second Chances

Donald Davie, 22 July 1993

Collected Poems 
by Patricia Beer.
Carcanet, 216 pp., £18.95, July 1990, 9780856357886
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Friend of Heraclitus 
by Patricia Beer.
Carcanet, 59 pp., £6.95, March 1993, 1 85754 026 3
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... his. The Carcanet list that houses Patricia Beer is a good deal more harmonious; but it features John Ashbery, of whom one has to say that if he is right, Beer is wrong, and vice versa. It is not a new phenomenon: eclecticism coming on as catholicity. But what results is a delusive fecundity that can’t be kept track of: with so many new starts, how to ...

Clarety Clarity

Colin Burrow: Herrick and His Maidens, 31 July 2014

The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick 
edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly.
Oxford, 504 pp. and 803 pp., £125, October 2013, 978 0 19 921284 2
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... came of age and could spend his own money he went to the flashiest college in Cambridge, St John’s. He later moved to Trinity Hall, where he complained to his rich uncle that he had ‘runn somewhat deepe into my Tailours debt’. He studied law and acquired expensive friends, many of whom he retained throughout his life. In 1623, aged over thirty, he ...

I now, I then

Thomas Keymer: Life-Writing, 17 August 2017

AHistory of English Autobiography 
edited by Adam Smyth.
Cambridge, 437 pp., £64.99, June 2016, 978 1 107 07841 3
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... the Oxford English Dictionary’s hundred most frequently cited authorities (one spot ahead of John Donne) for the earliest evidence of a word. He probably got this one from the German; it doesn’t seem to show up in French until 1820. Soon autobiography was everywhere, and not in a good way. Or so it seemed to the editors of the Quarterly ...

Common Thoughts

Eamon Duffy: Early Modern Ambition, 23 July 2009

The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England 
by Keith Thomas.
Oxford, 393 pp., £20, February 2009, 978 0 19 924723 3
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... and Christian orthodoxies informed early modern attitudes, so that the devoutly Protestant John Locke could assert on both counts that ‘labour for labour’s sake is against nature.’ There would be no work in heaven. But then in the second half of his chapter, on ‘the rewards of labour’, Thomas inverts this picture, tracing ‘the rudiments of ...

The Verity of Verity

Marilyn Butler, 1 August 1996

Essays in Appreciation 
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 363 pp., £25, March 1996, 0 19 818344 5
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... for the dead. Ricks does indeed appreciate, as his title promises, the creative writers Marlowe, Donne, Clarendon, Crabbe, Austen, George Eliot, Lowell and Hardy; the historian Clarendon, the philosopher Austin and the biographers Gaskell, Froude and Hallam Tennyson; and, throughout, the line of great dead critics ...
The Man with Night Sweats 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 88 pp., £5.99, February 1992, 0 571 16257 6
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... body to body, remains consistent. ‘It was not sex,’ but neither (to pick up an echo from John Donne) was it a mixing of souls. In ‘The Missing’, Gunn writes of his friends as ‘an involved increasing family’ (another family) of gay lovers: Contact of friend led to another friend, Supple entwinement through the living mass Which for all ...

It’s got bells on

Michael Neve, 21 June 1984

A Leg to Stand On 
by Oliver Sacks.
Duckworth, 168 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 7156 1027 9
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... Dr Faustus at this time, especially its passages on Hell – and Music.’ (When?) It is all John of the Cross, Nietzsche, Eliot, John Donne, Leibniz, Kant and, of course, music. The determination to exaggerate leads to two dreadful things: the reader, irony of all ironies, starts to disbelieve the writer. And ...

Alien Heat

Jonathan Gil Harris: ‘The Island Princess’, 17 March 2016

The Island Princess 
by John Fletcher, edited by Clare McManus.
Arden, 338 pp., £16.99, December 2012, 978 1 904271 53 6
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... from the Great Fire in September 1666. But the burning town wasn’t London. The play was John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, a tragicomedy written half a century earlier, and set on the islands of Ternate and Tidore in what is now Indonesia. The opening stage direction, however, states: ‘The Scene India’. The Island Princess is the only ...

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